April 13, 2010

Laurie Spiegel was born in Chicago (September 20, 1945) where in her teens she played guitar, banjo & mandolin, and through them cultivated a devout philosophy of amateur music making. After receiving a degree in the social sciences, she returned to music. Having taught herself notation, she studied classic guitar and composition privately in London, then baroque and renaissance lute at Julliard, and composition with Jacob Druckman and Vincent Persichetti.

Having worked with analog synthesizers since 1969, she sought out the greater compositional control which digital computers could provide and wrote interactive compositional software at Bell Labs from 1973 trough 1979. She later founded New York University's Computer Music Studio, and became famous in rock music circles for her music software for personal computers.

April 12, 2010

While the documentation shipped with the original Lisa only ever referred to it as The Lisa, officially, Apple stated that the name was an acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture or "LISA". Since Steve Jobs' first daughter (born in 1978) was named Lisa Jobs, it is normally inferred that the name also had a personal association, and perhaps that the acronym was invented later to fit the name.

Lisa was a major project at Apple, and with more than 90 people participated on the design, with more on the sales and marketing effort to launch the machine. The project began in 1978 as an effort to create a more modern version of the then-conventional design epitomized by the Apple II.
Apple's Lisa was first introduced on January 19, 1983, at a cost of $ 9,995,– ($ 21,693,– in 2009).

The Apple Lisa was a commercial failure for Apple. The intended business customers balked at Lisa's high price and largely opted to run less expensive IBM PCs, which were already beginning to dominate business desktop computing. The largest Lisa customer was NASA, which used LisaProject for project management and was eventually faced with significant problems when the Lisa was discontinued.
In 1989, Apple disposed of approximately 2,700 unsold Lisas in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah, in order to receive a tax write-off on the unsold inventory. Working Lisa's are now fairly valuable collectors items, for which people will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

April 08, 2010

Synth-Prog with melancholic chic by Alden Volney. A nostalgic reference with the Spirograph to John Whitney, father of computer animation, and Mary Ellen Bute, a specialist in visual music. Spacey sound, made with ACID Pro 7.0.